SSIS web service task parsing result.

Question

I have an ssis (2005) package that uses the web service task to download to a file destination. The file contains a string of xml data. After downloaded the file looks like this. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <string>--here is XML data with escaped characters--</string> My thought was I could then use the XML source data flow source to pull the <string> data, but when I set this up the XML source it will not read the <string> as a column. It will generate an xsd and it seems normal, but no luck seeing the column. Any ideas on getting this to work? Or would there be a better way to pull the data within the file generated from the web service? Thanks.

Answer 1

I found the easiest way to do this was to use the XML task with the XPATH operation to read the source (either from a file or variable) and then output to a file.

This worked easily, the key thing to remember is to set the XPathOperation to Values and for the SecondOperand put /"nodename" where nodename is the name of the node containing your result. For my case it was /string.